A new paradigm for being a conscious being here and now on beautiful Planet Earth. A cross between "synthesis", "renaissance", "cryogenics" and "benthic"..."a flowering of creativity that's extremely cool and very deep." And the name of a yahoo e-group I started in 2002, now with around 1800 members, mostly friends of mine. Cheers Jeff

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

NOTE:In the weeks and months following the 22 February quake I've written and compiled a lot of highly relevant information concerning the "not so natural" dimensions not only of the Christchurch event but also of the earthquake/tsunami that destroyed Fukushima Japan and unleashed a global radiological toxicity scenario. Check the links below to read my thoughts on all this:

"An opportunity for renavigation has been created; but will people as a whole take advantage of it? THIS is the issue. As I see it, the biggest form of awakening that needs to happen is for people to realize that the Earth is not a dead chunk of rock made of resources to be extracted; the Earth is very alive, and in more and deeper ways than most people would like to believe."

When Liesbet and I returned from Mt. Titiroa to Manapouri the day before the most recent Christchurch earthquake last week, we felt that we had just been in “the womb of the Earth” and were resonating with her consciousness so deeply that it was as if we were sensing her feelings as a planetary intelligence. We came away not only with a powerfully enhanced connection with nature, but also with a profound feeling that she, as a planetary being, is experiencing great pain and sadness. Our intuition is that a lot of her suffering is because of what humanity as a whole is doing; but she is also going through changes due to forces originating at the heliocosmic and galactic levels. The harm being done by humanity’s global technological civilization, our on-going koyaanisqatsi, is astronomical in its own right, but also serves to exacerbate the extra-terrestrially originating energetic shifts and imbalances, negatively affecting not only the Earth’s ability to maintain stability, but also our own ability to survive the “window of transition” we are now in.

New Zealand is no stranger to earthquakes, being located right on a major planetary juncture between two tectonic plates. Seismic activity and vulcanism are common in these areas. The north island region around Napier was devastated several decades ago, with far greater loss of life than the recent event in Christchurch. Cities like Auckland, which is built on a hundred or more extinct volcanos, and Wellington, which is close to the major fault-line, have had “quake awareness” for decades; but Christchurch is located in an area believed by many geologists to have been seismically inactive for tens of thousands of years.

In the past decade, ever since I spent a month on Maui and visited the Haleakala volcano there, I’ve had a fascination with volcanos. They are powerful in many extraordinary ways, and represent deep archetypes in the human psyche, as do earthquakes. Embedded in our collective psyche are memories of catastrophic events of terrestrial and cosmic natures; deep down we all “remember” times when the skies were darkened, the earth rumbled, bolts of lightning illuminated the heavens. Humanity has been here long enough to have witnessed countless displays of “theomachy” or the “war of the gods” which ancient rulers sought to emulate. Immanuel Velikovsky believed that humanity as a whole had been so thoroughly traumatized by the succession of these events that modern man’s overall disposition was that of a mental patient who had no recollection of what had happened, but who behaved irrationally and even self-destructively in the process of repeatedly “acting out” or re-creating those traumatic events.

Could it be that this deep-seated unconscious desire to re-experience catastrophes is what leads people to build cities in what could be potentially dangerous places, for example, inside the crater of volcanos believed to be extinct; or in the case of Christchurch, on a peripheral lava flow of a mega-volcano complex that had become a wetland, which was drained for agriculture and construction.

My main purpose in writing this article is to challenge the wisdom behind what appears to be the consensus of Christchurch leadership, which seems to be forging ahead with “building an earth-quake-proof city” with “buildings that can’t kill people.” These are more or less the words spoken by Christchurch mayor Bob Parker the day after the quake.

Geologist Mark Quigley said on the same day that a lot of new in-depth research needed to be done to verify what he thought, but that he had good reason to believe that the most recent quake was NOT in fact an “after-shock” from the September 2010 quake, but an entirely new sequence of events emanating from a totally different fault. He went on to say that both of these faults could indeed be part of a single much more extensive fault system yet to be mapped; the thing to be concerned about is that, if this were in fact the case, then the entire Canterbury area would be susceptible to quakes of far greater enormity than any of those that have already happened, as a long fault can generate exponentially more energy than its shorter sub-systems.

These words alone from a highly respected geologist familiar with south island seismology should be reason enough to postpone at least temporarily plans for “rebuilding” Christchurch, shouldn’t they? Not that basic infrastructure shouldn’t be restored, housing, businesses…but where do you draw the line?

To me, the biggest question is, given the pattern of events that’s already transpired in Christchurch: large quake out of nowhere…thousands of after-shocks…medium quake…thousands of after-shocks…much worse quake…”out of nowhere”? Hardly, given what had just happened in recent months.

Given this pattern, where is the wisdom or even sanity in immediately launching into a major re-construction campaign when the possibility totally exists of more quakes at any moment, which, according to Dr. Quigley, have the potential to be far more devastating than the one that just levelled the cbd of Christchurch and claimed over 200 lives.

I don’t claim to have the answers: where will all the people whose homes have been destroyed live from now on? Would YOU want to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on re-building your home, only to have it destroyed yet AGAIN?

I actually thought all this stuff after the September quake and its sequence of thousands of after-shocks, including the pretty big one on the day after Boxing Day. I was in a zone of silence at Wainui when it happened, and I remember hearing it quite clearly. It was actually a combination of hearing and feeling it. I knew what it was; there was something very eery about it. I definitely knew that it was not thunder and not a man-made sound, from subtle information contained in the harmonics of the rumble. It had some of the characteristics of a voice, the groan or moan of a being more than an inanimate sound.

Ever since we came back to the south island just before Christmas, we’ve been talking with just about everyone we’ve met about the quakes. Most people didn’t seem too flustered by it all, but then they’d mention, with a look of concern, “But when’s it going to stop?” This was before the quake of 22 February.

The only truthful and logical answer is that there’s absolutely no way to know. BUT the precedent has been fully established, undoubtedly, that the Christchurch area is NOW about as active seismically as anywhere can be; and it’s all totally unpredictable. In my mind, the more activity that happens, the more that could be on the way.

It’s a difficult situation. Not many people want to give up not only their homes or businesses that have been destroyed, but their entire city as well. Intelligence, however, requires looking at the entire spectrum of possibilities as far as they can be comprehended, right?

And sure, the “what if” road goes really far in many directions. But how many people, either still in Christchurch and surrounds, or exiled at least temporarily to other places, are asking their friends and themselves, “Could this happen yet AGAIN, and if so, do we want to be here for that?” I believe that, even as non-sensical and out of touch as many people seem to be these days, there would be few who weren’t entertaining these questions at least at some level.

Some might argue that since the quakes have happened, the “stress” that had accumulated has now been relieved; but according to geologists, these quakes were not the result of “stress.” Others might say that maybe the Banks peninsula mega-volcano is awakening out of what has long been believed to be dormancy or even extinction. Dr. Quigley mentioned a time-frame of “two or three million years” since these faults experienced movement. Volcanos, after all, are essentially tunnels that go way down into the Earth’s mantle; they are channels that allowed molten magma to flow up and out. I’m no vulcanologist but wouldn’t it be reasonable to think that, given sufficient heat from below, that these channels may not be capable of re-opening? The past year has witnessed more than one eruption from South American volcanos believed to have been extinct for thousands of years.

Speculation aside, however, what is clear is that this most recent disaster in Christchurch has presented an opportunity for re-navigation of everything that people there are about. At the immediate level, it’s forced people to wake up in a huge way because a lot of the things they take for granted suddenly weren’t there, including the solidity of the Earth itself. Homes, cars, food, water, comfort and safety, pets, friends and loved ones, some or all of these have been lost to many thousands of people. In a powerful way this forces people to be people again, back to the roots of what it really means to be a human being.

An opportunity is created for people to ask a lot of questions and to do a lot of serious thinking about a lot of things, pragmatic, philosophical, maybe even spiritual. It would be possible for a tremendous amount of socio-psychological, cultural, and metaphysical healing and growth to come out of all this. These events, this most recent disaster, could be a catalyst for a major transformation of what people think is important, or necessary, even what they think of as “reality.”

An opportunity for renavigation has been created; but will people as a whole take advantage of it? THIS is the issue. As I see it, the biggest form of awakening that needs to happen is for people to realize that the Earth is not a dead chunk of rock made of resources to be extracted; the Earth is very alive, and in more and deeper ways than most people would like to believe.

We have to become aware that we all together, as individuals and collectively, comprise a not insignificant factor in the overall equation of what is happening with the Earth. She feels the pain we are inflicting on her; she feels sorrow that so many of her human children no longer care about her or acknowledge her existence. Not only our actions…or inactions…but our thoughts, our intentions contribute to our “reality.” I believe that the Earth as a planetary intelligence, THE planetary intelligence of which we are an unconscious member is quite literally crying out to us to wake up from our artificial reality trance into the awareness of the peril of the natural world happening around us right now.

There’s not much we can do about changes in the sun’s energy, or emanations from the centre of the galaxy, or a super-nova, or an asteroid collision; but we DO have the option of stopping or cutting back on the ecological damage being wrought at increasingly enormous levels by the summation of our day-to-day activities, by the effects of our global military-industrial-technological civilization. Indigenous elders have been warning us for decades. We’d be a lot better off, for example, if instead of watching footy, we engaged in some basic science education.

And we DO have the option of deciding if we want to live in cities or not. Bob Parker said last week, with respect to rebuilding Christchurch, “Look at Napier, look at San Francisco.” They are both cities of varying size that successfully re-built after major earthquake devastation. But they are both still cities.

No city is a “natural” environment. It cannot possibly be. Cities of any size have huge concentrations of most or all of the most dangerous health and ecological hazards that humans are creating. Personally, I never understood why people would actually want to live in a city if they didn’t actually have to. Maybe a truly visionary perspective could prevail in Christchurch, and something kind of resembling a “city” could be re-built, but thoroughly de-centralized and arborealized, with traffic banned in the cbd just like in Berkeley, and no buildings over say three stories allowed.

Again, I don’t pretend to have any “answers” but I tried to help with some questions. A tremendous opportunity for renavigation of a lot of major processes has been created by these quakes, and globally, by the cosmic “window of alignment” we are now in; only the people of Christchurch, indeed, the people of our entire planet, will decide what they will do with this opportunity. The future, the fate of our entire species, and even life as we know it, may depend on the decisions we each make now and in the near future.

In Part Two I will examine existing evidence, not only from alternative scientific sources but experiences of friends and ourselves as well, which indicate an artificial origin for the Christchurch earthquake series.

Ultimately, the result is the same: whether the quakes are “natural” or “man-made”, we each are STILL an integral part of the overall system of human and planetary energies and consciousness.